When come back, bring pie.
Wait… I am to understand that guests have offered us the way to Make Money Fast and the administration here has disappeared those threads, keeping the secret to only themselves? This is the most outrageous thing I’ve heard since I learned that they’ve stopped making Monopoly.
Hey, hi again Sapo! It’s another lovely day for us down here in the tail, eh?
Except for the fart smell, yes, lovely. I always thought it was all the poop threads, now I know it is all for being on the tail. Darn my travel agent.
Well, no, not exactly.
I trust the mods and admin of the SDMB to browse the boards and weed out the crap, much like I’d trust my spouse to browse through the mail. I don’t mind if my spouse tosses the advertising circulars and credit card offers, but I’d object if they threw out a letter from my crazy Uncle Jim just because it didn’t contain anything of substance.
Dead Badger, I appreciate what you posted about the “standards of debate,” but that only really applies to a few forums. BBS2K posted his thread in MPSIMS and it was indeed mundane and pointless. There is no standard of debate in that forum, from what I’ve seen. For the record I’ll grant you that thread probably was too stupid to live, even in MPSIMS. But those threads are few and far between.
Evil Captor’s thread was in Cafe Society. Not much to debate there, either. Personally I found the premise rather boring. But I don’t think it should have been closed. I also object the needless swipe by the mod who closed it. Whoever it was suggested that he “just worked the ‘celebrity’ bit in there” (paraphrasing) to justify putting in CS. But that was the entire premise of the thread!
I appreciate Lynn’s reassurances that the mods know who the busybodies are. I’d hate for this board to steered in one direction or another by some vocal minority. I don’t see the need to report a post unless it contains personal information, a death threat, or a threat against the Reader. Let the mods do their jobs.
Oh well, time to get off my soapbox.
I don’t know about that. I really do believe that our community would continue to set pretty decent standards if let off the leash. We have a pretty long leash as it is and the standard remains pretty high. I see this as evidence that we’re pretty good at staying away from the insipidness (I have no problem with the weeding out of the trolls).
No worries. I didn’t take it personally. And thanks. 
Right. This is how I see it too.
Okay that was just hilariously large.
I sit corrected. 
Sarahfeena: I’ve spent enough time at that other board that I can explain to you what you did “wrong.”
See, you’re allowed to discuss the shows, but you’re not allowed to discuss the discussion about the shows. And even worse than discussing the discussion about the shows, is discussing the discussion of the discussion about the shows.
So, your first mistake was commenting on your perception that the other posters felt “hostility” toward large families. This is a no-no. And accusing the other posters of “hostility” is a extra-big no-no. (I’ve seen people do this before, and they always get slammed for it. )
I’m going to guess that your second mistake was saying something about how you didn’t understand why there was a problem with talking about how other people were reacting to the show, or something like that. Oopsie!
Unfortunately, this type of restriction means that the discussions of the shows can never get really interesting. Every time a thread moves beyond directly commenting on a show and starts to get into societal issues relating to the show, the conversation gets cut off.
Overall, the posters there are pretty intelligent and articulate, but in the end, you wind up with page after page of nothing more substantive than “Oh my god! VDO is so hot! LOVE!”
You are right in describing what their rules say, but not quite accurate in how it actually plays out. The reason I made a comment in the first place was because the conversation had gone from “that family is crazy with their 16 children” to “I know people who are from large families who are bitter and resentful over it and vowed that they never, ever, ever will have any children as a result of their parents’ selfishness.” This kind of comment prompted my response, and my response prompted them to ban me. Now, I’m not saying I didn’t violate the rules, but 1) they were already being violated and no one else got banned that I could see, and 2) I think a warning first might have been in order.
But the bigger picture is, you are right, those are the kind of heavy handed rules and modding over there that makes the whole board such a drag, and the only reason I bring it up here is because I would really hate to see that kind of thing happen around here.